


Ready (Unsteady)

by equivalencept



Category: Halo (Video Games) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Frederic-104 & Linda-058, Gen, see notes at the beginning for warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 00:00:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15717753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equivalencept/pseuds/equivalencept
Summary: In the aftermath of the augmentations, Linda and Fred grow closer together. A fic exploring how Linda and Fred might have first become friends.





	Ready (Unsteady)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place immediately after the Spartan-II augmentation process, and contains references to that and what happened in bootcamp, such as medical experiments, child abuse, child soldiers. That is not the focus of the fic, however. Basically don't read if you didn't like the Bootcamp section of the Fall of Reach.

Linda wasn’t used to having a mirror in her sleeping quarters. She was finding she didn’t like it.

She finished adjusting the neckerchief over her black dress uniform, and frowned at the still-healing scars on her face. They all had undergone the last surgery two days ago, and were finally done the augmentation process. The new scars were just an asterisk on a long list of new things to get used to, but Linda didn’t care to be reminded of it every time she looked in the mirror.

Another thing Linda wasn’t used to was so few bunkmates. She’d spent all of bootcamp in a large room with seventy-four of her fellow trainees, but now she only had one bunkmate. And she was lucky to have even that. The first week of the augmentations, which she only had a hazy recollection of between painful surgeries, she had been on her own. That had scared her even more than the unexplained surgeries.

After the first week, though, they’d wheeled in Fred. Linda would have preferred Kelly or John or Sam, or even her original teammates Michail and Therese - people she was actually good friends with - but mostly she was relieved to just not be alone anymore. After a week on her own, and no one to talk to as she was stoutly ignoring the doctors and DIs, she was even looking forward to his chatter. They’d shared a room for two weeks now, however, and he hadn’t said much besides the occasional angry outburst at the doctors.

Fred wasn’t speaking now, either. Already in his black dress uniform - he didn’t have to wrangle with the stupid neckerchief like she did - he sat on the edge of his bunk with a combat knife in his hands. He had previously been practicing his standard tricks with it, attempting to regain his old finesse, but at some point he had sheathed it and was now staring numbly at it in his hands. He’d managed not to cut his fingers this time, she saw.

Linda sat down on her own bunk across from him. The room was quite small, as expected on a ship, and she could easily rest her foot on Fred’s bunk if she so desired. She didn’t. Fred didn’t seem to notice her, and continued to stare blankly at the knife in her hand.

Linda waited.

The problem was - well, the immediate problem was that Linda didn’t know how to start a conversation with Fred. This had been made painfully evident the past two weeks they’d shared a room. Fred had always been the one to open a conversation. Before the augmentation process - before thirty of their own had died - he had talked all the time, about anything and everything, from comments on their surroundings to some biochemical equation he had read about. And his _complaining_. It had annoyed Linda, who liked her alone time to think and didn’t like whining, and it had been a large reason why she never became close friends with him. He wasn’t complaining now, though, and Linda found she wished he would, if only for something to pass the time.

Linda continued to wait. Fred continued staring down towards his hands.

It really had been a quiet two weeks. Linda got the impression that the only reason she had even been put in a room with another Spartan was because she had refused to talk to, or even react to, the doctors and DIs, and they needed to test that she actually could.

((Years later, in a brief respite between two failed attempts at stopping the Covenant’s ceaseless glassing, Linda would ask Fred what he’d done to get removed from _his_ single occupancy room. Hands fiddling with his knife, he told her he also hadn’t reacted well to waking up alone, especially once he’d found out how many of them had died. He never explained further than that.))

Linda snapped out of her reminiscence, back to the present situation. Fred was still staring down at the knife in his hands. Linda didn’t want to interrupt his thoughts, but she was concerned now. She knew some of the other trainees had had cases of catatonia, and right now the worse thing would be for Fred to be declared unfit for active duty.

Linda kicked her leg, the one still in a cast, up onto his knee. Fred, thankfully, started and looked up at her, then gave her a half smile. It looked a lot like a grimace, to tell the truth, but at least it meant he wasn’t catatonic.

Fred patted her foot and she dropped it back to the floor.

“You didn’t cut your fingers this time,” Linda said, gesturing towards his knife.

Fred shrugged. “The DIs blunted it.”

“Oh.”

Linda found herself waiting again. Fred, now slowly flipping the knife over in his hands, was also waiting. Waiting for -

“Trainees, please head to the launch bay at this time.” Déjà’s voice came over the intercom, truncating the awkward silence.

Fred flinched, but stood up once she was done speaking. “Are you ready?” he asked her, tucking his knife underneath his pillow.

Was Linda ready? To say her final goodbyes to thirty of her siblings? To Michail and Therese, who she had been with since day one?

She was...alright. Alive. Able to do what she had been preparing for these past eight years. So she had to be ready. She had to be. She still grieved the loss of so many of her siblings, but she knew that would have little effect on her ability to do her job. Mendez and their other instructors had stressed the importance of separating emotions from their missions, and Linda liked to think she had taken to the lesson easily.

“Linda?”

“Let’s go,” Linda finally said, refocusing back on the present. She quickly moved towards their door, stumbling on her crutches. She hadn’t answered Fred’s question of whether she was ready.

 

\---

 

“And so we commit the bodies of our fallen brothers to space.” There was a slight hiss as the pressure in the ejection tubes equalized, and the canisters were pushed out towards space.

Mendez continued to speak, something about the duties of a soldier, but Linda wasn’t paying attention. She didn’t need to. She knew her siblings better than Mendez, Halsey, or any of the other DIs did, and would feel their loss much more than they would, so she didn’t see the point in listening to some hackneyed speech about sacrifice.

She wasn’t the only one. Fred, beside her, wasn’t even looking at Mendez, but was staring out at space behind him. Towards the ash canisters. Where Michail and Therese were, and Fred’s Priyanga and Trevor.

When they’d first learned they would be putting their teammates to rest in space, Fred had burst out, “Why can’t we bury them on Reach?”

Linda privately agreed. Reach was their home, not a ship that they would never serve on, and they would be returning to their home planet soon enough. Why couldn’t they bury them in the forest around Big Horn River, or scatter their ashes across the Menachite Mountain?

((Later, several decades and countless deaths later, Linda would wonder if there actually had been anything in those canisters labeled her teammates and siblings, or if ONI had kept the dead Spartan bodies and lied to the living ones. But before that-))

The funeral came to an end, and the Spartan trainees began to trickle out, many ushered by doctors back to their rooms. Linda took stock of who was left.

Blue Team - including Kelly, who had gone into cardiac arrest only two days ago - had all made it. Gray Team, too, was fine, though they were the first to leave once the funeral was done. Black Team, which had begun to include Otto sometime in the last two years, all stood in a cluster towards the back of the room. There were teams that didn’t make it past the augmentation process, like Orange Team and Purple Team. Red Team, though alive, had all been incapacitated by augmentations, and it was uncertain whether they would ever fully rehabilitate or not.

Those were teams who had all first been formed on the first day of bootcamp. Sink or swim as a team, it seemed. Live together, die together.

What did that say about her and Fred, whose original teammates had died on the operating tables besides them?

“Linda,” Fred said beside her, startling her out of her daze. He squeezed her elbow gently before letting go. “We should go.”

Indeed, they were the only two trainees left in the bay. John, with Sam and Kelly beside him, waited by the door. Linda paid one more glance at the remains of her teammates, the gray tubes now impossible to see against the overwhelming black, and turned with Fred towards the exit. Linda returned Blue Team’s nod, and Fred waved at them, but they did not depart back to their bunks with them.

“Go back to your rooms. Mandatory bed rest for everyone,” a doctor waiting outside informed them. Linda had heard the orders leave Mendez’s mouth, but intended to ignore them, just like she intended to ignore this doctor. Like she had ignored all doctors and medical personnel for the past three weeks.

“Hey!” The doctor exclaimed as Linda passed by her. Fred, less willing to disobey orders, hesitated, but then fell in step besides her. She saw the doctor walk off, perhaps to find a DI - someone Linda might actually listen to.

“Where are we going?” Fred asked, not questioning that they were going together. Linda didn’t question it either, like she would have three weeks ago.

“To the snipping range. We both need to get back into practice.”

 

\---

 

The snipping range, like everything else on the ship, sucked. The ship wasn’t nearly long enough to hold a full four kilometer range in it. Instead, there was a five-meter by ten-meter room, with four simulation stations set up that allowed soldiers to “practice” firing with any of the UNSC-standard sniper rifles that lined the walls. Except the guns weren’t real - they were even weighted slightly differently - and there were only so many different variables the simulations could change. And these stupid guns didn’t have any of her modifications on it, like her rifles back at bootcamp did. It was nothing like practicing at an actual range, and _nothing_ like firing in an actual combat situation.

Linda fired off another “shot”, and at the last moment felt her hand gripping the trigger spasm. The shot went wide – another missed target, the third time in a row. She pulled away from the rifle entirely, and started massaging her palm.

Linda scowled down at her hand. She really couldn’t avoid her scars, no matter where she looked. Even out of the corner of her eye, she could see the incisions that had been made to reinforce the cartilage in her nose, and she couldn’t help but focus on the scars on her hand as she massaged it. These scars cut up her metacarpal bones and curved around her knuckles, then stretched all the way up to the beds of her nails. There were also deeper cuts in her wrists that had been made to access her flexors, though thankfully she couldn’t see those with her black dress uniform in the way. Which was now dirty from lying down on the bracer mat, and Linda took grim satisfaction in that.

Slowly flexing her trigger hand, she restarted the simulation with the other.

First shot – hit.

Second shot – miss.

Third shot – off by one meter. Damn! She was fine with a still target with no wind or rain, but as soon as the weather changed, she always adjusted too much or too little. Her muscle memory of making micro-adjustments was wrong. When would she regain it? Would she ever-?

Linda pulled away from her rifle again, and rested her head down on the mat. Calm down, she thought. Breathe in for five, out for five. Yes, she told herself, of course she would regain her old skill, and then some. She would just have to practice. More. Her teammates depended on her skills. Not that her skills had saved thirty of her –

She was broken out of this careening train of thought by a stifled gasp.

Fred had been as quiet as a ghost beside her for the past hour, like he had mostly been for the past two weeks, so Linda hadn’t noticed when he had turned off his simulation. He was on his side now, back towards her.

Linda heard that same sound again, which she now realized was a muffled sob.

“Fred?” Linda scooted over to him, not bothering to stand up on her bad leg, and moved to touch him. She was careful to let him see her out of his periphery. Fred flinched away from her, though – as if _she_ was going to hit him for crying like the DIs would.

Linda, once again, found herself floundering for what to say. She wished Kelly were here. “It’s okay, Fred,” she tried, and reached to pat him on the back again. This time he let her touch him, though she didn’t know what to do once she did. She had distant memories, that grew even more distant with each passing year, of someone rubbing her back when she was upset. She tried mimicking that motion now. “It’s okay,” she tried again.

“No, it’s not!” Fred burst out. Well, no, of course it wasn’t, but what the _fuck_ else was she supposed to say in this situation? Linda pulled away from him, and settled for lying down next to him.

“We didn’t even get to say goodbye,” Fred continued a short time later. He was quieter, but his breathing was somehow even more ragged.

They wouldn’t have said goodbye if they had lost their teammates in a firefight, Linda could have pointed out, but didn’t. She knew what Fred meant. They’d thought the operations were going to be routine, not three weeks of fatal hell. At least when preparing for a mission, they would have known someone might not make it back.

Fred’s breathing seemed to be getting even more uneven, if that was possible. It certainly wasn’t good. This was a medical ship, so everyone’s biosigns were monitored by the ship’s AI. If Fred’s biosigns got too erratic, medical personnel would be called, and Linda would rather go off pain killers than deal with those know-it-alls again.

“Fred, come on. You need to control your breathing.” Sympathy and comfort hadn’t worked. Time for tough love. Scanning the room, Linda’s eyes landed on Fred’s simulation rifle. “Here. Use this.” She dragged the rifle closer towards him, but Fred didn’t move.

“C’mon, Freddy-Bear,” Linda snapped, because it was a guaranteed way to piss him off. Sure enough, he rolled over towards her.

“What?” he asked, angry now but still breathless.

“Take this,” She passed the rifle to him, then turned to the simulation monitor. She switched the timing of the targets so that they would appear every ten seconds. Hearing Fred finally moving behind her, she switched the targets to close range and stationary, though variable along the x- and y-axes. When she turned back towards Fred, she saw he had positioned the rifle, but wasn’t facing the simulation screen.

“Linda, I don’t-”

“I’m starting it now,” Linda said, and pressed the start key.

Almost eight years of training kicked in, and Fred responded, even if his body was slow on the uptake. He automatically leaned over the rifle, and clumsily started taking shots. The first couple went wild, as erratic as his breathing. But then he started to inhale before pulling the trigger and exhale after, like he’d been taught, and with the ten second pacing of the targets, this meant he was taking slow breaths. Like how Linda had calmed herself down not too long ago. As his breathing evened out, his shots became more accurate.

Not as accurate as before the augmentations, though, and Linda had to match his breathing before she could convince herself their old skill would come back.

After five minutes, the simulation came to an end. Still maintaining his slow breathing, Fred reached over and powered down the machine. He got up to return his rifle to its place on the wall, and did the same for Linda’s, before joining Linda where she was laying on her back on the mat.

“Thanks,” he whispered.

Linda waved him off. After a few minutes of companionable silence, much less tense then the strained silence of the past two weeks, Linda grudgingly spoke up.

“We should probably get going soon. I think that doctor was trying to find a DI to go yell at us.”

Fred grunted, but stood up and reached out a hand to help Linda up, which she accepted.

“Ready?” Fred asked her.

“Yeah,” Linda said as she balanced herself on her crutches. “I think…we’ll be okay.” Which was a lot more accurate than what she had told Fred before.

((And months later, Linda had regained her old skill, and Fred had started talking more again. And although both were more somber than before, they were okay, as Linda had said they would be.))

  



End file.
